Global chemical giant Bayer is suing insurance giant American International Group (AIG), alleging decades-old insurance policies should have helped cover billions of dollars in legal costs from cases involving its Roundup glyphosate-containing weedkiller, Insurance News reported.
In the suit, filed in St. Louis County court in the week before the 4 December report, Bayer alleged that AIG and its subsidiaries had refused “to honour their contractual obligations to provide insurance coverage for numerous lawsuits” filed against Monsanto, the US agrochemical firm it acquired for US$63bn in 2018.
“More than 56,000 lawsuits have been filed against Monsanto by more than 149,000 plaintiffs,” the suit said.
“At present, approximately 50,000 of those lawsuits remain pending. Thousands of additional lawsuits may be filed against Monsanto in the future.”
Bayer’s new lawsuit focused on insurance coverage that it said Monsanto had purchased from AIG decades previously, Insurance News wrote.
Since 2020, Bayer has paid more than US$10bn to settle cases involving Roundup, according to the report.
The company has repeatedly said that decades of studies had shown Roundup and its active ingredient, glyphosate, were safe for human use.
According to experts quoted in the report, the new suit signalled Bayer’s willingness to pursue insurance companies to help cover payouts involving tens of thousands of cases.
At the time of the report, AIG had not responded to a request for comment and Bayer had declined to provide additional information about the case.
Following its acquisition of Monsanto, Bayer had inherited a suite of liabilities, the report said.
Roundup had sparked personal injury claims alleging that its active ingredient, glyphosate, caused health issues like cancer.
The suit said that, from 1967-1986, Monsanto purchased millions of dollars in general liability coverage from AIG and other insurers, which the suit alleged were AIG subsidiaries, to protect against such claims.
Bayer has alleged that the past insurances “are all excess liability policies, which were purchased as protection against, among other things, the risk of mass tort liability arising from the use of products, a significant risk for any major manufacturing company.”
The suit claims that the insurers “are obligated to reimburse Monsanto” up to the insurance policies’ applicable limits, as well as for costs that the company “incurs to defend itself” against the underlying claims.
In July 2024, Bayer had submitted a demand for payment to AIG related to Roundup costs, the suit said, adding that the company had shouldered costs that “exceed the limits” of the relevant insurance policies.
Meanwhile, the journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology (RTP) had retracted a paper from 2000 that concluded that the herbicide glyphosate was safe for humans after a scientist and historian raised concerns that the study’s authors had not disclosed that Monsanto – the original producer of Roundup prior to the company’s acquisition by Bayer – had paid them for their work, Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) reported.
In addition, Monsanto employees had played an undisclosed key role in drafting the paper, the 5 December report said.
Evidence of Monsanto’s role in drafting the study emerged during litigation against the company in 2017, with corporate emails released at the time revealing that the firm’s employees had ghostwritten the review internally, C&EN wrote.
Monsanto had since denied the allegations, the report said.
In its retraction notice, RTP said: “The potential financial compensation raises significant ethical concerns and calls into question the apparent academic objectivity of the authors in this publication.”
